More recently, the pace of the swindles has slowed, though they still turn up at twice the rate of a decade ago, according to litigation support firm Marquet International, which looked at Ponzis of $1 million or more in the United States from 2002 through 2011.

That makes being on your guard for red flags as important as ever. And if you do get taken in by a Ponzi, here's an advisory: They usually take years to unwind, and the amount of money recovered for innocent investors is often meager.

At Cleveland State University, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Professor Alin Rosca said tracing money that flows out of Ponzis is tough because their masterminds have a perverse incentive to postpone the day of reckoning -- when investor cash runs out -- by squeezing every penny out of every possible source.

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"When the scheme collapses, there's not much money left, because if there was they would have spent it to postpone the collapse," said Rosca, an attorney at Fishman Haygood Phelps Walmsley Willis & Swanson in Cleveland. His practice focuses on investors defrauded in Ponzi crimes.

Jordan Maglich, a lawyer who blogs at Ponzitracker.com, said victims typically get back 5 percent to 10 percent of what they invested -- and little or none of their supposed gains.

In the meltdown of Akron-based Fair Finance Co., a bankruptcy trustee has worked for three years to locate more of the $208 million scammed from 5,300 Ohio residents. So far, victims haven't gotten any money from the Fair Finance estate.

"Unraveling these Ponzi schemes and the pursuit of related recovery actions is extremely complex and time-consuming, making it difficult to say when distributions will be made to investors," trustee Brian Bash said last week. "Litigation is expensive and rarely completed quickly."

Bash and his team at the Baker Hostetler law firm have retrieved some of Fair Finance's far-flung assets, but have another 35 judgments totaling $48.3 million that they've been unable to collect on so far, according to the trustee's March 15 report to the bankruptcy court(pdf). Bash also is chasing much bigger recoveries, including a judgment he's seeking against Fair Finance's now-imprisoned former chief executive, Timothy Durham, of almost $135 million.

The court has approved disbursing about $4.7 million to pay Baker Hostetler fees and expenses and another $1.9 million to other professionals and for costs such as banking and insurance fees.

That's left about $5.8 million in a money market account maintained for investors, according to the March report. U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Marilyn Shea-Stonum has said investors should eventually get at least half of anything tracked down.

Fees to lawyers, accountants and forensic analysts have to take priority, otherwise they would be unlikely to tackle the complex job of untangling the fraud, said securities lawyer Bruce Lowe at the Taft Stettinius & Hollister law firm in Cleveland.

The dispute with just one of more than 140 businesses and people Bash has sued to recapture money for investors -- National Lampoon Inc. -- shows how things can quickly get complicated.

Bash says Durham, who was CEO at National Lampoon for about five years while he was at the helm of Fair Finance, provided $9 million to the Los Angeles-based entertainment company over the past decade.

In response to a discovery request, National Lampoon submitted more than 60 gigabytes of information, roughly equivalent to 1,500 bankers' boxes of documents. Sorting through the mountain of data won't be the end of the National Lampoon part of the case, either.

"The trustee anticipates that the matter will ultimately proceed to trial," Bash wrote.

Occasionally, post-Ponzi sleuthing is fast and fruitful. Maglich, an associate at the firm of Wiand Guerra King in Tampa, Fla., recently blogged about a case that a trustee called the "holy grail" of Ponzi recoveries.

When a $1.2 billion Ponzi by Florida attorney Scott Rothstein blew up and Rothstein fled across the globe, investors braced for the worst, Maglich wrote.

Instead, three years later, the trustee appointed to recover funds for Rothstein's victims said he expects they will get 100 percent of their invested losses. That's largely because he successfully pursued a bank alleged to have played a key role in the scam.

Lawyers figuring out the mess left by fraudulent executives Industrial Enterprises of America, which operated an automotive fluids company outside Pittsburgh, also have reached third-party settlements,

A new management team restructuring Industrial Enterprises under bankruptcy protection sued not only former Pepper Pike lawyer James Margulies and co-conspirators, but also a New York shareholder services firm and Baker & McKenzie, the world's second-largest law firm by number of lawyers. Baker & McKenzie settled IEAM's complaint for an undisclosed amount.

"That's been a development over the last few years," said Jeffrey Baddeley, a lawyer at Ulmer & Berne and adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. "You've got to chase someone other than the originator of the scheme."

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